Chuck Kleinhans Writing: Published Essays

Conference paper for Visible Evidence 18
NYU, August 2011

Thanks, Dan. It’s wonderful to be here at the conference and hear about all the interesting
projects people are working on. I’ve been especially grateful to hear about new multi-platform
documentary work and web-based distribution and exhibition. And with this current project, I’m
especially glad for the increasingly close connection of media archivists and media scholars and
artists as bom out at this conference. I’ve done only a little archive work in the past, but being
able to have contact with so many talented people in the area gives me enthusiasm and
confidence to move ahead.

JoAnn Elam’s Everyday People

A Process-Oriented Analysis of a Labor Documentary’s Archive

Today I will be talking about some of the archival materials for an unfinished labor
documentary, Everyday People, about letter carriers and the US Postal service.

Feminist experimental filmmaker JoAnn Elam (1949-2009) is best known for two pioneering
feminist experimental works, Rape (1976) and Lie Back and Enjoy It (198-). She also made a
series of regular 8mm films, what I would call avant garde home movies, which were shown
locally in Chicago. All of this material is now in the Chicago Film Archive, and along with help
from her sister and me, the archive will be preserving and making available this work in a variety
of platfonns, including a website. There are over 700 film elements in the archive, which are
currently in the process of being assessed for what they are, and what preservation they might
need.

My particular project at the moment is trying to develop a web presence for her unfinished film
about Postal letter carriers. She worked on Everyday People intensively for about 10 years (in
the Carter and Reagan eras) while herself a letter carrier. Although unfinished, her extensive
record keeping and journals allow us to see her work process and evolving political ideas. In her
notes and extant footage, JoAnn has an extended analysis of how the Postal Service institution
functions, its labor-management relations, and how individual carriers understand their situation.
This is, remarkably, a current issue in Washington DC, with the US Postal Service almost
bankrupt, and wanting to close 3700 post offices, fire 160,000 workers, change union contracts
to fire more, change and reduce from established federal health and retirement benefits, end
Saturday delivery, and carry out more extreme cost-cutting measures.

JoAnn’s analysis, begun 30 years ago, extends from large-scale policy issues (since the PO was

supervised by Congress, ultimately) to the details of the carriers’ daily job. JoAnn also had an
extremely witty way of looking at class as well as a gender analysis of social relations.

I am now in the process of working through these materials, with the aim of opening up the
materials’ multiple layers on a website which provides access to and organization of the physical
archive at the Chicago Film Archives. Today I will quickly detail the scope of the archival
materials and the aim of the project. The film was based on an understanding of labor history
(with a special debt to Flarry Bravennan’s Labor and Monopoly Capital) and also reflected
Elam’s origins as an experimental filmmaker and her repeated feedback screenings, particularly
to labor activists.

To give you sense of the project, I’ll show a short clip. This is from a 18 minute rough cut work
print then ransferred to VHS and now copied to DVD that JoAnn showed a number of times to
letter carriers, documentary and experimental film audiences, and to labor activists in different
parts of the US. Asa one light work print, you will see mostly black and white images (the
original is in color).

Show:

From 4:00 to 9:10

The film was begun in earnest during the Reagan Era, though JoAnn had been working at the
Post office for about 5 years by that time. The incomplete film was shot and taken to screening
rough cut edits, but my interest is not in “completing” a film that remained a work in progress for
many years. As is the fate of many, perhaps most, documentary films, it refers to events of its
time and there’s no need to “finish’ it. Rather it can stand as a model in the larger sense of what
it means to make a political documentary in term s of production, politics, aesthetic and practical
choices, and the role of the engaged maker.

In other words, rather than addressing us as citizens concerned with a specific set of issues, the
archival presence can inform us about the way we conceive of such issues, strategize and
delineate talking about them, and work with media to make the isues present.

The archive materials around the film provide deep insight into the creative process, a
filmmaker’s evolving political analysis, practical issues of workplace and home life, and
challenges of funding and making self-financed documentary. It also presents a case study for
issues of auto-ethnography and the pragmatics and ethics of filmmaking.

What we saw in the clip was the rapid montage visual editing that supports the sound track
interviews as letter carriers detail certain aspects of the job. This section of the film was used by
JoAnn to demonstrate what she was working on to others, particularly postal workers and she
showed it in several cities at labor meetings or postal union events. She wanted to see if it made
sense to that audience as well as the general audience.

As someone who discussed the project with her at the time, and who fdmed some of the first
footage shot for the film (of JoAnn on her route), I saw some significant changes. The first
versions of this section of the film were much more “experimental” in the sense that the cutting
was rapid and often associative, and not linked to a specific narrative voice over by one of her
interviewees. What was interesting to me was that even though it was much closer to her highly
ironic experimental work, it was easily understood by the audience, even though they were not
familiar with avant garde film. I think this was because they were so intrigued by the images of
mailmen doing their job that the “radical form” did not get in the way of grasping the film. As a
general rule, I think this is true and often discussed it with JoAnn. The idea that “ordinary
people” need a kind of simple realism to grasp a complex idea is a myth of the unimaginative
folks who themselves are insensitive to creative forms.

I should explain that originally JoAnn had plans for a much more inventive music track. The
film would have used Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” and the Marvellette’s “Mr.
Postman,” but when she wrote to the publishers, they refused her. (Actually JoAnn was naive
about this; you can get permission, and usually for a reasonable fee, but you have to go through a
rights management company which charges a hefty fee.) For the web, it would be possible to
have hotlinks to online versions of these songs, so that people could be reminded of the original
songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVOR28iG o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= dVtl lUZOuA

The film was begun at the same time as MTV was getting started, and music videos were just
coming into their own as a unique genre.

There are more interviews that JoAnn did for the film which are available, both transcribed and
as audiotape, dealing with issues that extended the discussion of the letter carrier’s lives. For
example, “Joe” discusses the hazards of having 6 or 7 taverns on his route at which the daytime
“regulars” knew him from his many years of service and offered to buy him a drink (and like
many alcoholics, often tried to rope others into their behavior). Similarly, he explains, some
lonely women on the route came to know him as the mailman, then offered to know him much
more intimately. Fie explains his turning them down as not wanting to create jealousies or bad

feelings if the arrangement didn’t work out and he remained on the route.

JoAnn had projected doing a whole section of the film on the postal Strike of 1970, but had not
done the interviews with veterans of that era and had only scratched the surface of that history.
This was a decisive event for the union in general because militant locals, especially in New
York, began wildcat strikes in defiance of the national union. (I should explain here that the
letter carriers and the clerks—who work only inside the PO have separate unions which work
together). The “crisis” of the postal service had been predicted, and the strike was a major
national event, and Nixon had to handle it. The resolution took the PO further away from control
by Washington politics (which was good) but also opened up the whole reorganization issue and
marked the move to control of the workers and workplace. [I need to do more research on the
history of the PO to follow the details here].

A more complicated problem is posed by the heavy duty analysis of labor that underlies JoAnn’s
understanding. JoAnn learned the basics of the labor situation for letter carriers through personal
experience, by being there on the job. But, to refer to a rather famous point made by Marx,

Lenin, Gramsci, and Mao in their own distinct ways, from simple observation people can get to a
certain point of recognition of their situation, but they need a more scientific analysis to
understand the larger patterns. For JoAnn that ws provided by one of the major books on the
labor process, Flarry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (197-). Braverman, working in
the broad terrain of labor history and Marxist economics, decisively analyzed the industrial labor
process of advanced capitalism. What he found was that rather than simple efficiency and
increased productivity guiding management, (Something we could expect, and which would then
explain workplace exploitation) actually control of the worker was the higher imperative for
management.

While somewhat counter-intuitive, this insight explained a grat deal of what JoAnn was
experiencing in the Post Office, which in the 1970s was undergoing a wave of rapid change as
“automation” was brought into the workplace, replacing skilled craft with mechanized
production. JoAnn’s notebooks contain extensive notes and summaries from her close reading of
Braverman (I should point out that she was brilliant, but also an auto-dictat, only later in life
doing college studies and getting a ddegree in accounting.

But even more interesting, to me, is that as the film went on for over a decade, and her own
relation to the project changed as she was fired for insubordination at the Post Office, had to find
another career (which she did as tax preparer, then bookkeeper, then accountant), she returned to
Braverman and wrote a series of acute remarks correcting and modifying his original work. This
was the “shop floor” response, the testing theory against practice, that made her analysis so
determined, original, and important. So, I think that web publication will allow me to bring that
forth in a coherent way.

The film went through a long hiatus in the later 1980s and throughout the 1990s. Part of this was
a function of JoAnn losing her job at the PO and having to scramble to find another way to make
a living. Part of it was family matters: JoAnn’s mother lived in the same building and developed
cancer. Her husband lost his job as a letter carrier and also had to find work while dealing with
alcoholism and recovery. In looking through the archive notebooks I was somewhat surprised to
find she had begun to develop a further analysis, particularly in terms of revisiting the issues of
work and labor in the current neoliberal period. From reading her notes on that subject, I sense
that she was refining, from a distance, the discussion of labor and seeing it in a clearer light, but
also one which would model the changes in the Post Office as emblematic of the rise of
neoliberalism in the post Vietnam war era.

As my work on the archive continues, some of these matters will become clearer, and as more of
the archive be comes available hopefully more people will be able to conribute to studying the
corpus of her films, and this unfinished project.

Thank you.